Thursday May 22, 2025
Freud's Three Blows to Human Narcissism
In the inaugural episode of the Great Dangerous Books Podcast, hosts Jim and Jared explore the concept of 'dangerous books' and their significance in the liberal arts tradition. They discuss the importance of engaging with challenging literature, the emotional resistance to psychoanalysis as articulated by Freud, and the implications of narcissism in understanding human nature.
8 months ago
Great show! Thanks for doing this episode and citing your sources. I’ve been trying to drill down on this ”Copernican trauma,” ”blow,” or ”collision” — ”Kopernikanischer Stoß” in Freud’s German. I think you’re right that Freud underestimated the impact, and that it had to do with the vertigo of the universe as an incredibly old and centreless, infinite void. The Copernican insult to the western mind also comes from the epistemological relativism it implied. ”The sun rises in the east” is still relatively true from an earthbound perspective versus a Venusian one. (And we still call Venus’s orbit ”retrograde” relative to Earth’s.) One thing you tripped over in your commentary is that there is no single correct perspective that comprehends all perspectives. We still like to think there is an objective ”god’s eye view” on the cosmos, but this is also denied to science, and that has been the continuation of the Copernican blow into the era of Einstein. Relativism was broadly a part of Renaissance humanism with its development of critical historiography and historicism, archaeology, and textual criticism. These things were and still are resisted by fundamentalists and reactionaries of many kinds who all tend to fit the narcissist profile. However, I’m sure that if western culture resolved again into some kind of master myth and metanarrative accepted by most, its own rationality, moral justifications, and correctness or mere adequacy would eventually be challenged and overthrown.